A Grace Note for a Gritty Business

Recycling in New York is a scrappy business. Billions have gone toward building water tunnels, power plants, subways and sewage treatment facilities, but little toward an infrastructure of recycling. In turn, New Yorkers have been slow to separate bottles and cans the way they flip a light switch or swipe a MetroCard: Recycling remains less an everyday fact of life than a do-good option, like tipping the mail carrier at the holidays.

But a Sims Municipal Recycling Facility will open shortly at the South Brooklyn Marine Terminal in Sunset Park. The city’s first big, state-of-the-art plant for processing discarded plastic, metals and glass, it promises jobs to nearby residents and, as the cost of exporting garbage out of state rises, some savings for the city.

Did I mention that it’s an architectural keeper? No, it doesn’t resemble a giant egret or stegosaurus skeleton, or sport flying titanium panels. And its designer didn’t cost some obscene premium. The facility is understated, well proportioned and well planned — elegant, actually, and not just for a garbage site. It is an ensemble of modernist boxes squeezing art, and even a little drama, from a relatively meager design budget. Sanitation projects are usually the ultimate NIMBY flash point. This one makes a good case for the social and economic benefits of design — and for old-fashioned industrial waterfront development as an abiding urban virtue.

Barges loaded with metals, glass and plastic from the five boroughs will converge on the site, cutting, Sims estimates, about 250,000 miles that sanitation trucks now travel around town, a windfall for city air quality and traffic congestion. The project started a decade ago. The Sanitation Department was seeking a long-term recycling partner. Sims Municipal Recycling won the job. It proposed to build a plant on an 11-acre decrepit pier, a former police tow pound, at the Marine Terminal. The facility would handle most of the city’s recyclables, up to 20,000 tons a month, and include an education center that wasn’t just a repurposed closet with an instructional video to torture captive schoolchildren.

The city committed to fixing up the pier. Sims, in turn, reviewed projected sea-level rise — this was years before Hurricane Sandy — and decided to elevate vulnerable parts of the site by up to four feet above city requirements (using recycled glass and crushed rock from the Second Avenue subway project). Spending the additional $1 million for that purpose kept the pier dry last year when Sandy’s 12-foot surge flooded nearby streets and crippled other waterfront businesses.

And instead of letting engineers design the plant, as often happens at an industrial site, Sims hired Selldorf Architects, a glamorous New York firm known for doing Chelsea art galleries and cultural institutions. This was not an unprecedented move. The city enlisted Ennead Architects to design the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Even so, it was something akin to A&E getting Pierre Boulez to compose a soundtrack for “Duck Dynasty.”

The idea?

Partly to game the public review process, but also to build a well-designed plant — welcoming to the public, beckoning from the waterfront.

Recycling is a high-minded although notoriously low-margin, capital-intensive, volume-based industry, dependent on increasing public participation. So the plant needed to be a good citizen and neighbor. At the same time, it had to function as an advertisement for itself.

Selldorf was, in retrospect, an inspired choice. The German-born Annabelle Selldorf runs the firm, which stresses crisp lines, elegant volumes and a clean, formal vocabulary in which nothing goes to waste.

Devising a site plan, Ms. Selldorf knew that the main, shedlike L-shaped building with all the recycling equipment had to hug the southern edge of the pier, where barges would unload. That meant the northern edge could become a public-friendly zone, with the education and visitors center, trees, bioswales, a grassy entrance and parking for school buses. The center, including offices, a cafeteria, classrooms and a terrace with a killer view over the harbor, became a light-filled, three-story shoe box, parallel with the pier.

The geometry of buildings produced a satisfying suite of courtyards, a mini-cityscape. The broad pitched roof suspended over the main building creates a clerestory for light and air. For visitors, the drama of the architecture unfolds moving through it: a sky-high catwalk linking the visitors center to the main building leads to a bird’s-eye view of the mountain of recycling machines. Cranes, trucks and barges disgorge the city’s discards below; the machines sort and crush the maelstrom.

It’s bound to be an awesome spectacle.

In its stripped-down aesthetic, the plant brings to mind factories in Germany or Norway, where recycling is routine and good design integral to the social compact. An enormous rooftop solar array that Sims says is the largest in the city, helps power the facility. Mussels dangle on ropes from the pier, birds patrol the shore, a wind turbine is on its way.

Will it inspire people to recycle?

That’s the $110 million bet. New York City taxpayers invested $60 million in the site; Sims, $50 million. Eventually, the city will own the whole kit and caboodle. Architecture added 1 percent to the final bill, estimates Sims’s general manager, Tom Outerbridge, a pittance considering the fees for many public projects involving front-rank architects. Ms. Selldorf told me that she appreciated the tight fiscal leash, as all good artists want constraints.

She used recycled steel. Materials are off-the-shelf. Instead of a clunky corrugation, the default skin for warehouses, she opted for a thinner, rounded paneling (modest extra cost), which shimmers in the light. She grouped downspouts to syncopate one facade and flipped the skeleton (the beams and struts) from inside the walls to the outside on part of the main building to give its flesh some bones.

Urban waterfront projects these days foretell a better quality of life. They boast parks and kayak launches, bike paths and luxury apartments.

But the waterfront still must serve the city’s infrastructure, otherwise even more industry moves by truck through the streets. Keeping industry on the waterfront improves quality of life, too.

That the new Sims plant was built at all is testament to decades of perseverance by environmentalists, and to the power of local government in this era of Washington gridlock. That it adds an improbable grace note to a gritty stretch of Brooklyn waterfront can be chalked up to enlightened industry harnessing the power of architecture.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Grace Note for a Gritty Business. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe